Has Jeremy Corbyn Learnt Anything from What Happened Between 2015 and 2019? Or is Your Party Destined to Repeat the Same Mistakes?

Will Corbyn Take a Leaf Out of Zarah Sultana’s Book & Stand Up to the False Anti-Semitism Smears of the BBC & the Right-wing Media?

When the far-right Times journalist, Oliver Kamm, accused Zarah Sultana of ‘anti-Semitism’, a term that has been drained of all meaning, she stood up and declared that anti-Zionism was not anti-Semitism.

Kamm’s splenetic response had been on account of Zarah’s declaration the previous day that she was a proud anti-Zionist. It is to be welcomed that the lesson Zarah has learnt over the past decade is that the way to defeat the Right is to stand up to them and not back down. She is right to reject the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism.

Jeremy Corbyn on the other hand seems to have learnt nothing. Throughout his leadership he declared that he supported the so-called Two State Solution, which was never anything other than a cover for continued colonisation and occupation.

Whilst such a mistake might have been understandable in the past today it is not. The Israeli government and the Knesset made it clear when they voted by 68-9 for a resolution rejecting a two-state solution that Zionism is not interested in anything other than the expulsion of the Palestinians. Not one Zionist party opposed the resolution.

The problem with Corbyn is that although he has always supported the Palestinians against Israel’s occupation and oppression he has never asked why Israel behaves in the way it does. He has never called himself an anti-Zionist. Zionism is a foreign land to him.

Instead he has accepted that a seemingly rational and sensible solution like the two state solution could be agreed. Except that we don’t live in a reasonable and sensible world. We live in a world dominated by Western imperialism of which Israel is its attack dog.

Israel is a settler colonial state. What that means quite simply is that the settlers seek to replace, not live alongside, the indigenous population. I defy Corbyn or anyone else to point to a single example of where settler-colonials have opted to live peacefully with the native people.

It is true that in its early days some Labour Zionists like Kalvarisky and Chaim Arlossoroff thought they could persuade the Palestinians to peacefully accept colonisation but Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, which Netanyahu adheres to, wrote in his famous essay The Iron Wall that:

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.

This is also the answer to those dishonest Labour Zionists who pretend that Zionism is some form of Jewish national liberation movement rather than a colonisatory enterprise.

The slogan which became identified with Zionist colonisation was that Palestine was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’. Lord Shaftesbury is said to have coined the slogan. It expressed perfectly the attitude of the colonists to the native people. They simply did not exist. In Australia it was termed terra nullis.

The Zionists were warned that Palestine was not empty, most famously by Ahad Ha'am, a Cultural Zionist, who wrote:

We tend to believe abroad that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, a non-cultivated wilderness… But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country, Arab land, which lies fallow... [The Truth From the Land of Israel, 1891. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs]

Throughout the pre-state days the Zionist movement was obsessed with the question of how they would turn the minority Jewish population into a majority. The solution they agreed upon was ‘transfer’ or what we would now call ethnic cleansing.

David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel and Chairman of the Jewish Agency (the pre-State government) wrote on 5 October 1937 to his 16 year old son Amos:

We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our disposal.

This is one of a host of similar quotations. Zionism always had to the fore of its mind the ‘demographic problem’, the question of how to ensure that there was a stable Jewish majority in the state it created.

In 1948 this was achieved in the areas i by means of the ‘transfer’ of the Palestinians to the neighbouring countries. Three-quarters of a million Palestinians were expelled. In 1967 Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza but much to their regret they did not succeed in expelling more than 300,000 Palestinians.

Over two million Palestinians remained which today has grown to 5 million. A temporary solution was to institute military rule over the Palestinians, depriving them of all democratic rights whilst according those same rights to the Jewish settlers. However this Apartheid was always envisaged as a temporary solution.

The Israeli Labor Party and Meretz envisaged a Palestinian Bantustan dressed up as the two state solution but Netanyahu and the settlers refused to accept any kind of Palestinian state. To them there was only one solution – either complete subjugation and no democratic rights or transfer/expulsion. Oslo was about a Bantustan.

Today in Gaza we are seeing these plans coming to fruition. Ethnic cleansing coupled with genocide. Just as in Nazi Germany where Hitler first sought to expel the Jews before turning to genocide.

Israel is a settler-colonial state. It will never agree to a Palestinian state and those who foster such illusions are helping to maintain Israel as a Jewish Supremacist state. Israel is an expansionist state and that is why, alone in the world, it has never defined its borders. Today it is in occupation of parts of Lebanon, Syria and well as Palestine.

The original aim of the Zionists was to achieve Eretz Yisrael, the Biblical Land of Israel. The borders of the Land of Israel stretch from the River Litani in Lebanon to the Euphrates in Iraq and the Nile in Egypt. In other words there is plenty more room for expansion.

Of course Israel, the attack dog of the West, can only conquer more territory with the permission of its imperialist sponsors but as we know they are reluctant to hold their rottweiler back.

There are some things that Corbyn should understand. A Jewish state, like any ethno-religious state is a racist state. This was true of the Christian ethnic states in Eastern Europe – Romania, Slovakia, Croatia - which were the most enthusiastic partners of Hitler in the Holocaust. It is also true of Israel. Israel cannot be reformed. It must be replaced by a unitary democratic secular state.

That is what anti-Zionism means. Anyone who supports a two state solution is not an anti-Zionist. Objectively they are doing the work of the Zionists. Anyone who is sincere about putting an end to ethnic cleansing and genocide must be clear. Israel is a failed state. Israel has no more ‘right to exist’ than Apartheid South Africa or the Nazi state.

Corbyn must abandon his support for the two state solution . It is a neo-colonial solution. The reason that Labour Friends of Israel pretends to support it is because they know it will never happen. It is a slogan designed to confuse the Palestine solidarity movement. When you are faced with a genocidal apartheid state, a Zionist state, then you cannot be neutral as Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in the face of injustice. That is to take the side of the oppressor. It is long past time when Corbyn declared he was an an anti-Zionist.

Schneider and Sophie Nazemi

Your Party will face many difficulties in the years ahead. If it is to succeed it must have a united leadership agreed upon common principles. One of those must be its attitude to Apartheid Israel. It has to be an anti-Zionist party. Yes we will be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ but it will be easier to rebut if we are clear about our principles.

If the McCarthyists and racists accuse us of anti-Semitism let them. We can tell them that the original Zionists were Christians not Jews. That Zionism is a Christian invention. That when Zionism first came on the scene most Jews saw it as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. It was Hitler who did more than most to create the Israeli state. We are clear when we say that it is not anti-Semitic to support equality between Jews and Palestinians in Palestine just as we supported equality between Black and White in South Africa.

If Jeremy Corbyn is not prepared to abandon Zionism and the Israeli state then it is best that the leadership of Your Party passes to the young and dynamic Zara Sultana.

Those of Corbyn’s advisors who failed to stand up to the anti-Semitism smear merchants – Karie Murphy and James Schneider in particular – should also not be in the leadership unless they are prepared to come clean about their own past role.

Schneider is married to Sophie Nazemi, Starmer’s press secretary. Are we seriously to believe that the married couple don’t discuss politics together? Schneider should be kept as far away as possible from the leadership team.

We need clear red water between the future and the disastrous period 2015-19 when Corbyn supported Jon Lansman turning Momentum from a campaigning organisation into a one-man dictatorship that ended up echoing the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement’s ‘anti-Semitism’ smears. It was no surprise when Lansman joined them.

If we don’t get things right now then the present honeymoon period will not last.

Tony Greenstein